The Millions Interview: Phillip Lopate

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Phillip Lopate is a master of many literary forms. Best known as an essayist and a champion of the personal essay, Lopate has also written three books of fiction and two volumes of poetry, with his next, At the End of the Day, forthcoming in January. This spring Princeton University Press published his latest book, Notes on Sontag, as the first in a series of Writers on Writers. In Notes on Sontag, Lopate weds his memories of Susan Sontag as a teacher (though never his), cinephile, cult figure, and intellectual idol, with an analysis of her essays and fiction, and in doing so takes on her aversion to the personal essay. Lopate states accurately in his introduction, “Those who are looking for a hatchet-job here will be as disappointed as those seeking hagiography.” The end result is a thoughtful, intellectual, and at times comic account of Sontag’s writing and life. As Monica McFawn’sQuarterly Conversation review claims, “Lopate’s strongest case for the personal in literature is his own riveting sketch of Sontag.”

I was lucky enough to take a nonfiction workshop with Lopate this summer as part of the Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius, Lithuania. The intellectual rigor and witty sense of humor that informs his prose made the class both stimulating and enjoyable. We met one morning in Vilnius, not far from Cathedral Square, to speak about Susan Sontag, the personal essay, and his book.

The Millions: In your introduction to Notes on Sontag, you call your ambivalence for Susan Sontag “a promising basis for a work of literary reflection.” Could you talk more about your ambivalence and why you thought that was a good starting point for this book?”

Phillip Lopate: I think the essay gravitates toward doubt and self-doubt. And then you untie the knots along the way, only to create more knots. So in many ways this book on Sontag is a defense of the essay. It’s a book-length essay, and what I value most in Sontag is her work as an essayist, especially her first three collections of essays: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, and Under the Sign of Saturn.

I have a complicated relationship with Sontag, both as a reader and as an acquaintance, and I thought that this project would give me the chance to work out what I really thought about her and her work. Ambivalence is a good starting point because you don’t run out of things to say. You’re always at war with yourself, in a sense, and that guarantees a certain tension.

TM: You mention your personal relationship with Susan Sontag. One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was the way that you interspersed analysis with personal reflections. I was wondering how much that played a role in your conception of the book, and if you think you would’ve written the book without having known her. It obviously would’ve been a different book.

PL: Well, I’m a personal essayist first and foremost, and one of the curious things about Sontag was that she went on record expressing a disdain for the personal and thought there was something tacky about writing about yourself, though the times that she did it she did it brilliantly. So, in some ways, I’m a different kind of essayist from Sontag and this book is mainly an analysis of her work. I would say it’s 80 percent analysis, 20 percent personal vignettes and memories. You can’t be 100 percent objective. I wanted to show that a human being was writing the book, and one comes with certain predispositions, prejudices, and so on.

I also thought it would be funny because a lot of the memories are funny. One of the amusing sides for me in the book is that Sontag was a brilliant writer who was not particularly known for having a sense of humor. A lot of my material is comic, more or less, and so I thought that even though Sontag isn’t funny I could find a way to write in an amusing way about her and about myself. Because, in a way, there’s nothing funnier than someone who takes herself very seriously and has a solemn reverence for greatness. So I was able to play with that.

I think that one of the main things that gets me going as a writer is the opportunity to do mischief. And in this particular respect I was analyzing one of the sacred cows of contemporary literature, an icon really. I knew that I was on thin ice a lot and that itself piqued my interest because I could get in a lot of trouble. One of the ways I could get in trouble immediately was by confessing that in some ways I had always wanted Sontag’s respect for me as a writer, and I had never quite gotten it. I would be handing those hostile to the book a weapon against myself, saying, Oh, well, he’s just got an ax to grind, or has a vendetta, but in fact I really wanted to give her my respect every time I could for the work that I love by her. So I don’t think it’s at all a hatchet job. It’s really an attempt to be much more measured. But I gave critics the opportunity to say, He doesn’t understand that he’s just working off his pique. I did understand I was playing with that. The personal is part of what makes the book dangerous—dangerous for me, anyway.

TM: In the book, you mention that Sontag ended up writing quite a bit about herself in spite of her desire to avoid the personal. I’m wondering in what ways you think she revealed herself through her essays and what is the source of her disdain for writing about herself.

PL: Well, it’s funny, when she was quite young she said in a diary entry something to the effect that all writing is an exposure and that you basically want to say something to express yourself, but then she joined a kind of high-minded backlash against the memoir, saying that self-expression was not important and what was important was imagination. She herself moved away from the essay and thought more and more of herself as a fiction writer. So in a way, she devalued her own thinking and put a greater value on making up plots, making up characters, in other words, getting away from the self. That’s one thing you can do. I’ve done that myself—I’ve written fiction where I’ve made up characters, but a lot of what I do is also detaching myself from myself and making myself into a character so that I know I’m not exactly the person I call Phillip Lopate in my writing.

Now, her work is very expressive, for better or worse, of her character. And you can track that development, how she was enthusiastic first about some things and how that changed. It’s very revealing. One of the things that I say in the book is that she didn’t think against herself. She liked to take a strong position and back it up. And then ten years later she would take the opposite position. But in a way, one way of defining the difference between us is that she was an enthusiast and I’m a skeptic. As soon as I begin to march in one direction for a cause, I begin to see the arguments against it and wonder. You could say that I’m just more doubtful from the start.

So it is a kind of conversation between two writers. Even though one of the writers is no longer with us, she has written all these books and I am talking to her. She is my captive audience.

TM: It’s an interesting choice to write about Susan Sontag, given that you’re a personal essayist and that she avoided the medium. How does one write a personal essay without becoming too self-absorbed, or having it become therapeutic? What’s the line?

PL: I think the line is you attend to the form of the work. That is, it’s not a question of what you need therapeutically but what the essay needs. You keep shaving off one part, adding another part, and building a form the way a potter works with clay. I don’t think that writing is intrinsically therapeutic, though I do think that it helps us to come to terms with our demons and it helps us to attain some consolation or equanimity. There is a kind of psychological benefit from writing, at least I’ve experienced it as such.

But I think that if you can make a work of literature—it doesn’t matter whether you’re starting from your own experience or inventing something—you are imaginatively shaping it in some way. There’s the imagination of the real as well as the imagination of the made-up. For me, starting from more experience and shaping it into a pleasing meditation or a pleasing autobiographical piece or memory piece—that’s the justification. Really, giving pleasure is the justification. And the reader can tell right away whether you’re fooling yourself or whether you’ve gained enough detached perspective on yourself. The reader really is the final judge and you just have to internalize the reader and say: Oh no, that’s way to self-absorbed, the reader doesn’t care about that, why are you going on about that? That’s how you acquire some sense of perspective.

TM: Returning to what you were saying about the imagination and Sontag’s writing, in spite of her triumphs with the essay, she preferred to think of herself as a novelist. In the book you mentioned that you, as well as many others, don’t think that her fiction measures up to the level of her essays. Do you think her disdain was a reflection of a greater literary sentiment?

PL: Certainly I think that fiction has more status than nonfiction, just as poetry does. In the beginning of MFA programs, God created fiction and poetry and saw that it was good. Some upstarts came from nonfiction and said, “Hey we want to get in on this boat, too.” I think that if you look at the prizes that are given out every year, there are many more given out in fiction and poetry than are given out in essay writing or other kinds of nonfiction. I don’t think that Sontag was alone at all in this. She was part of a whole generation of writers who actually can be said to have been better at nonfiction than fiction but preferred to think of themselves as fiction writers. I include in that James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Gore Vidal, possibly even Norman Mailer, Joan Didion.

Sontag felt the big game was fiction. And that’s where you win the Noble Prize. You don’t win it for writing essays. That’s understandable and that would’ve been great had she been a great fiction writer. Some people can do both, but she lacked a deep sympathy for other people—which is okay if you’re a critic because you don’t have to be that empathetic if you’re a critic, you just have to know what you think about something. And she lacked, for the most part, a sense of humor. It’s hard to be a great novelist without those two things. Somehow she also disdained realism and naturalism for a long time, so that meant she didn’t put that much emphasis into building characters and situations but was much more interested in experimental fiction; when she practiced it, it seemed a little dry. I’m not saying anything that devastating because she was so good an essayist, it’s not a crime not to be a terrific fiction writer also. It’s just that because I love the essay, I regret that she came to put her eggs in another basket.

TM: You are a champion of the personal essay, we’ve talked a lot about this in class. I was thinking about Sontag’s dismissal of nonfiction in relation to our nonfiction workshop, where many people are turning in pieces of fiction. What do you think about the status of nonfiction in general?

PL: I think nonfiction is going to be around forever, and in many ways may sell more books than fiction. That is, in the marketplace, nonfiction probably does better on the whole than fiction. But it’s still hard to get collections of essays published. You can get them published individually in magazines, but you have to create an aura of specialness to get a book of essays published.

I do think that recently nonfiction has been invaded by the allure of fiction and poetry, and there’s a great deal of hybridization that’s fascinating in some ways. It’s a period of experimentation and mutation. It just so happens that I cherish the assets and values of good nonfiction, so I am championing them and saying before we mutate too much in the direction of fiction and poetry, we should just take a step back and realize there are some things quite wonderful that nonfiction can do, including reflection and analysis. You don’t have to make everything into a scene with dialogue. You can actually have the narrative voice reflect as hard and as stimulatingly as possible and give us the full benefit of the thought.

TM: Speaking of reflection, you write that when reflecting on Sontag, she is always provoking you to think harder. At one point you speak of her heroes of the intellect, including Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, and how they shaped her intellectual approach. I was wondering if you would include Sontag as one of your heroes of the intellect, and what aesthetic standards you hold yourself to.

PL: I certainly would include Sontag as someone who had a great influence on me as an essayist. She taught me how to write, let’s say, the twenty-five-page essay where you go in and you circle something from all sides, the way she did in “Notes on Camp.” Clearly the title of my book, Notes on Sontag, plays off of “Notes on Camp,” and the idea of taking notes and arriving at some greater understanding is something that appeals to me a lot. And also, she wrote in a rather epigrammatic, aphoristic, condensed way and I do find that attractive just as I find it attractive in the people who she was inspired by, such as Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin. In a way, Sontag and I were both drinking from the same fount. She certainly was one of my intellectual heroes and the people who were her intellectual heroes were some of my intellectual heroes as well. I guess I also consider myself more proudly American than she did, and so I don’t only take inspiration from abroad but I take it from American writers as well, including a lot of American essayists, like Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy.

TM: In Notes on Sontag, you follow a section called Don’t Get Personal, about the ways that Sontag avoided the personal essay, with a section of your own reflections, Later Memories of Sontag. I thought that added to the levity and the humor that you spoke about earlier. In that section you also mentioned a desire to become closer to Sontag, and this reminded me of your essay about Donald Barthelme,“The Dead Father,” where you speak of a desire to be closer to him, too. Do you think the personal distance they imposed on you and on others enabled them to write as well as they did? I was also thinking of the section in Notes on Sontag where you cite, “Sontag commented often how difficult it was for a woman writer to appropriate the oceans of alone-time that every writer needs.”

PL: Well, they were both, for want of a better word, provincials. They both came from other parts of the country and moved to New York, Sontag from the west—Arizona and California—and Barthelme from Texas. In a way, they were both self-invented and they came to New York. They remade themselves in New York. The whole avant-garde is always from out-of-towners. I’m a native New Yorker, and so in some ways I’m more traditional, you know, because native New Yorkers have seen avant-gardes come and go. We say, “Yeah, yeah, I’m not going to get too excited about this.”

I think that in both cases, my piece about Barthelme and my book about Sontag, I was working on the double portrait. And the double portrait means that it’s going to be about the other person and it’s going to be about me. And that creates an extra interest and tension. In both cases, I was exposing myself to the charge that I was basically chagrined that these literary lions did not take me to their bosom. It’s funny because there have been a number of terrific writers who have given me the benediction and said that they really liked my writing. But it’s less interesting to write about that than it is to write about relationships that only grew so tall. I call them bonsai tree relationships. I wanted to investigate why some acquaintanceships don’t turn into friendships, for instance. What is it that prevents them from growing more? And of course that says something about the literary life and about people protecting their status and choosing quite carefully who will be a peer, who will be an acolyte, and so on. That’s part of what makes the literary life so brutal and so fascinating. In both cases, with Barthelme and Sontag, I was younger than they were but not so young that they could embrace me as one of their mentees so to speak, and therefore more threatening. I was breathing down their necks.

But that’s a curious thing—the whole notion of how people choose to withhold themselves or to give themselves is very interesting and I have to say that I’m the same way. I’m fairly self-protective. I’ll be cordial and helpful with my students but I won’t necessarily let many of them become my friends. Writers have to be very protective. They can’t just give pieces of their heart to everyone.

TM: Is that because you have to maintain space in order to write?

PL: Yes. And in Barthelme’s case he was an alcoholic, which meant after a certain hour of the day you weren’t getting the full sober Barthelme, you were getting somebody who was, you know… in a funny way alcoholics lose some of their individuality. But he was certainly brilliant during the working hours.

TM: I’m wondering if there’s something that I didn’t touch on that you’d like to talk about.

PL: I’d just like to say that for me the book was a literary and stylistic challenge. What I was really trying to do was to write well. To do a kind of peculiar thing, which is a book-length essay that functions on a lot of different levels so that it has this kind of novelistic component, as though it’s about a relationship. You might say that Sontag is an older sister. It has this familial quality but it also has a lot of literary criticism, but I didn’t want to be an academic literary critic who was applying ready-made theory. I liked the idea of reading her work and then saying, “What do I really think about this passage?” Not, “What should I think about it?” but, “What do I actually think about it?” and, “Does this ring true, does this ring false?” without the benefit of a ready-made theory. So you might say it’s amateur literary criticism, but honest, trying to be as honest as I could.

Anne K. Yoder
is a staff writer for The Millions. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Fence, Bomb, and Tin House, among other publications. She currently lives in Chicago, where she's at work on a novel. Read more of her work here: http://annekyoder.tumblr.com.

Reading a novel by Dana Spiotta is a dynamic experience because you're never quite sure what tiny storytelling miracles it will offer next. The tone might shift, or the story might reveal something wholly unexpected. You might be pushed forward in time, or given sudden intimacy to a character that was held at a distance for so long. Every time I immerse myself in her work, I am reminded what a novel can do. There are no rules for storytelling, only instincts, emotion, and the brainy brain. Spiotta's latest book, Innocents and Others, is about two female filmmakers, friends since attending high school in L.A., and a third woman who forges her most meaningful relationships over the phone with men she's never met. How the three women's lives intersect is one of the book's little miracles. But there is also so much more to this book that defies quick summary: technology and how it creates, bolsters, and distorts identity; making and consuming art; the responsibility and trespassing of representation; friendship; imagination; the fear of being unoriginal. The week I was reading Innocents and Others, I kept saying to my husband, "I love Dana Spiotta!" To my new baby I'd sing, "Spiotta! Spiotta!" in a weird squeaky voice. To my four-year-old, I'd say, "Leave me alone, I'm reading." It's telling that I, a person who has never loved movies, loved this movie-loving novel.
Ms. Spiotta is also the author of Lightning Field, Eat the Document, and Stone Arabia. She answered my questions via email.
The Millions: Lately I've been interested in books that are readable but also create suspense in non-traditional ways. Innocents and Others fulfills this requirement: the shifts in narration, and the way the pieces fit together, create drama while bypassing the typical cause-and-effect-to-climax formula. In your books there are often a lot of structural surprises, such as a switch in perspective or time frame, or, even, a shift to a different narrative mode, be it a description of a movie scene, or an essay on a website, and so on. I love this! It keeps me from being able to categorize or truly know the narrative until I am finished and can step back and see it as a whole. Do you set out to write a book with these kinds of shifts and disruptions, or are they a byproduct of your process? I also wondered if you bring this point of view to your classes as a writing teacher. What are your thoughts on plot, for instance?
Dana Spiotta: You just gave a very perceptive description of some of my narrative strategies. And I like what you say about not knowing the book until you are finished and can see it as a whole. I do think a lot about structure: structural analogies and the engineering of the book as an integrated object. I think much of the deeper meaning in a novel is created by these kinds of formal decisions. It is one of the things I love about writing novels, truly. In the novels that have stayed with me, when I get to the end I want to go back and read the book all over again. You can only understand a novel’s shape when you reach the ending and see all the connections, the repetitions with variations. The rhythm and juxtapositions. All of that ideally will accumulate and resonate as much as the narrative itself. I don’t know how successful I am at creating meaningful novel shapes, and I am sure my idiosyncratic structures annoy plenty of readers. But I try to be organic about it and let the structure emerge as I work. Then as I revise, I become more deliberate about shaping it for meaning, but I always try to resist too much neatness and symmetry, or easy correlations. It has a lot to do with intuition, and what you find interesting as you are writing, I think. I use this Samuel Beckett quote for my own purposes when I talk to students (and myself) about structure: “The danger lies in the neatness of identifications.”
I don’t focus on plot in particular, but I do focus on character and conflict, though, and that leads to plot complications. And like some other novelists (and filmmakers), I sometimes skip important events and show the aftermath before I show the event. I did it in this novel because it felt right in the moment. And then I kept it in because it created something interesting to me. Dischronology works in a similar way to how cutting between various threads in a novel creates side-to-side momentum, not simply forward momentum. But it should never seem arbitrary, and I am always aware of the risks. One doesn’t want to feel that something is withheld simply to create narrative suspense. You better have some other, deeper reason for doing that. In Innocents and Others, maybe I was more interested in the consequences of actions than in actions themselves. I wanted the action refracted by the fallout from the action.
TM: For a novel that's largely about film, there aren't that many straight scenes (as there are in movies). Here, there are first-person essays, descriptions of movies made by the characters, retrospective musings on past relationships, and so on -- time is nimble and elastic, and the narrative controls and contorts in a way that feels distinctly (and wonderfully) novelistic. As in: this could only work in a book. And yet, Innocents and Others feels really cinematic: there are distinct details, bright and memorable moments, and they are artful. People say that about your work, right, that it's cinematic? What does that word mean to you, and to your writing? And what is the difference for you, between the art of film and the art of novels? The similarities?
DS: I do describe some imaginary films in the novel, and within those films dramatic things happen. So I get more conventional scenes and action within the film story as well as in the “real” world of the novel. But they are filtered/framed through something: the consciousness of the viewer or a technological device or some other distortion.
I am not sure what cinematic means when applied to novels. I wanted to play with the grammar of film and visual culture, and I think applying ideas from one medium to another one is a way to discover new ways of making meaning. But I agree with the cliché that the best novels make the worst films. I think that fiction is concerned with language and consciousness in a way that film can’t be. Voice, consciousness -- cinema can do a voice over, but it usually feels very performative, too talky, a bit artificial. Private thought, consciousness, is evoked visually: usually an actor’s face, a POV shot, images remembered in a montage. Language play and repetition -- the way a word or a sentence or a even just similar syntax separated by 50 pages can make subtle and mysterious connections -- that only works in a novel.
I do like to write about the experience of watching. In this book, and in my others, I wanted to explore what it feels like, in the body and mind, when we watch a film (or listen to music, or surf the Internet, etc). How our own subjectivity distorts what we see or how we understand what we see. I am interested in the primacy of visual information. And the deceptiveness of various technological mediations: movies, phones, the Internet, etc. And I am deeply interested in the thingyness of technology -- how it shapes us both in body and mind.
TM:Stone Arabia ends with a first-person memory from 1972, and Innocent and Others also ends in an unexpected way, with a scene of someone the reader has only met once: a minor character whom we suddenly get this intense and beautiful access to -- and even now, I'm not sure if it's a filtered representation of her or as "real" as one can get in fiction. My husband said it was like how Don DeLillo'sAmericana ends -- with a scene that is quite different than what comes before, and is not commented upon or totally explained. (Full disclosure: I don't remember the last scene in DeLillo's novel, but my husband's description was pretty entertaining.) Can you talk about your novel endings (without spoilers, I suppose...?), and how you come to them? How do you want your reader to feel when they finish one of your books?
DS: Your interpretation of and reaction to the end of Innocents and Others is spot on, wonderfully keen about what I was attempting. The ending of a novel is the most important aspect to me. As a reader, I have studied the ends of my favorite novels. The ending has to be of the case but also not predictable. It has to have a satisfying closure for the reader, but it doesn’t have to answer anything or shut it down. Instead it can open up or circle back. For example, my favorite ending is the famous ending of Ulysses. It works on a formal level, a narrative level, and a character level. We get an interior monologue, which is of a piece with but also an escalation of the stream of consciousness we get in the first third of the book. It fits the odyssey organizing principle, so in an important way it is inevitable. At long last we get to be intimate with Molly, someone we have heard about for the entire book, but this is the first time we hear from her mind directly. So on a narrative level we are primed and excited to hear from her. We really want it! She gives us another perspective on her son’s death, on her marriage, on her daughter, on her infidelity, on her body. It builds on the book’s way of seeing things from multiple perspectives. And finally, it ends on a moment of joy and love (that famous “Yes”) but it is a memory of a past moment, so it is poignant and resonates in multiple ways. It has a satisfying closure, a sure beauty, but it also changes how you look at the whole book (and this very particular relationship). So that, I think, is the gold standard of landing a book. Everything put in motion has to pertain. But it still has to swerve and avoid being too neat or schematic.
As for my own work, I try to surprise myself (and my reader) but still be true to the built-up meaning. I try to remember everything that has come before, both in form and content. Often I work by reading over everything that I have written so far before adding to it. When I get to writing the end of the novel, I have read it over and over and over. So it is all in my mind as I write, which I hope gives it the density of accumulated meaning that I strive for. I feel it is necessary to take a risk at the end, to reach beyond the previous borders you have set for yourself, to wild it up a little.
TM: There's a lot about imagination in Innocents and Others. For instance, the imagined films of young Meadow Mori that don't exist -- and, yet, are there, sparkling in the land of potential. And Jelly, who loves to call men just to talk, muses how meeting one of her phone friends would only lead to disappointment: "the failures of the actual to meet the contours of the imaginary." Of course I want to connect these two. Is art-making like that: is our future, unmade work perfect because it doesn't exist yet, doesn't have to face the harshness of the real? What parallels to writing are there here for you, either with Meadow's filmmaking or Jelly's phone calls?
DS: I wanted those things (making films or making phone calls) to be very specifically what they are and not a stand in for writing novels. But I think it would be disingenuous to say I don’t share some of the agonies of imagination vs. reality that these characters experience. Perhaps I am interested, broadly, in how people respond to the enormities of the wider world, or even the harsh realities of a local, quiet life. In Eat the Document, the question of how to respond (or answer back, or resist) was political and focused outward, with all the complications and consequences of those actions. In Stone Arabia, Denise tries to overcome her paralysis so she can connect in some way while her brother Nik retreats to his own private world, much like Jelly or Sarah in Innocents and Others. Meadow and Carrie make art. Most responses feel inadequate, failed in some way. And many of the things we attempt we later see as failures and mistakes. But there is something poignant and beautiful in those fractures in your ordinary life, the moments when you realize that you were mistaken or insufficient or what you did had an unintended consequence. The clarifying and humbling experience of shedding your delusions. (At one point, Meadow says she doesn’t mind that she might be a bad person, but she would hate not to know it.) But then what? I’m not so interested in truly “bad” characters. I’m interested in bruised idealists. And the ruptures that make you question yourself, that make you implicate yourself in your own life. These are when people are at their most human, I think. It is about questions, not judgments, and letting people be as complex and contradictory as they genuinely are. And I am curious about what people do after these moments. Especially over time as the days and years go by.
TM: I love the female friendship here between Meadow and Carrie, two very different people and filmmakers. Carrie remarks, "Unlike marriage, which must be fulfilling and a goddamn mutual miracle, a friendship could be twisted and one-sided and make no sense at all, but if it had years and years behind it, a friendship could not be discarded." Man oh man I love this line and I'm not even sure I agree with it! Can you talk about characterizing these two women and their relationship? Also, what do you think about the rise in stories lately about female friendships, be it by Elena Ferrante, or on TV shows like Broad City. Any thoughts on why these stories are capturing us right now? What interests you about this kind of relationship?
DS: You have zeroed in on the quote that captures who Carrie is, and I am not sure I agree with her either. I like writing about non-romantic connections, writing about other kinds of relationships. The ones that endure and hum through our whole lives: siblings, parent-child, and long-held friendships. Maybe because there is no real mechanism for ending them? And because of that, you end up with someone in your life who is very different from you, who made very different choices. I like unconditional love as an idea. There are some friends that if I met them today, we might not become friends because we no longer have a lot in common. If we were married, we would get divorced because we “grew apart.” But I love those kinds of friends -- they keep you honest and humble. They remind you of what you used to be and what you used to want. They are a form of memory.
TM: Because The Millions is a book site, I must ask, What's the last great book you read? And because you are Dana Spiotta, I must ask, What's the last great movie you saw?
DS: Several come to mind. The Joy Williams collection of essays, Ill Nature, is a radicalizing, provocative book. She argues with true passion and urgency. I found it tremendously persuasive -- and, as always with Joy Williams, the sentences are flawless. I also loved The Visiting Privilege, the collected stories of Joy Williams. Her novels have taught me so much about writing, and to go back and read her stories makes you realize how extraordinary her work is, how accomplished and how mysterious. She is in a category of her own creation. Don DeLillo’s Zero K is a compassionate and radiant novel. The questions it asks about death (“Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?”) hit me very hard because I have been slowly losing my own father. I love DeLillo’s celebration of the “shaky complications of body, mind and personal circumstances,” his wonder at the details of the quotidian every day, and his joy in language and the mystery of words. The intensity of his noticing is epic. Did I mention that it is also funny -- the dialogue in the first half is classic funny DeLillo. What else? It has the word “scatterlife” in it. It also has this one-sentence paragraph in it: “The world hum.”
The last great movie I saw was Force of Evil, which was directed by Abraham Polonsky in 1949 and stars John Garfield. Polonsky and Garfield were both blacklisted by HUAC shortly after this film came out. I have seen it many times and recently watched it with a friend who had not seen it. In Polonsky's view, the system makes it impossible for any man to be good. Everyone in this movie is trapped and money makes it impossible to not be somewhat corrupt. But Polonsky shows us that even within the compromised morality of capitalism, there are moral choices. One can be less corrupt, less craven, or one can be more. The sort-of hero in this story, John Garfield, is a man who honestly admits his greed. He has that, a lack of self-delusion. But the insidious thing, the trap, is that all men must sink to the lowest possible point. The system rewards only the worst behavior. He tries to do one good thing for his brother out of guilt or loyalty. The two of them try to remain human, and they suffer for it. The system will crush everyone, however some will keep their dignity. Plus it has an iconic final scene on the pylons of the George Washington Bridge. But maybe the real greatness lies in the sad and beautiful face of John Garfield.

Many Latin American immigrants could tell us stories if we took the time to listen to them. The trouble is, if we did, and we really took these stories in, it would be much harder to rationalize the billions of dollars spent “securing the border” against a conveniently faceless menace.

Eugene Lim will not choose between superheroes and soliloquies. His new novel, Dear Cyborgs, shifts between quick bursts of pulpy action and long philosophical monologues. Characters kidnap, shoot, and poison one other, then weigh the merits of protest and relay brushes with gentrification. Capitalism looms over the book like one of Marvel’s Sentinels -- inescapable, maybe indestructible. Low art sits next to high, smudging the hierarchy. The term “thoughtful dystopian romp” comes to mind. The year or universe is hazy, but we can make out some of our less fine hours, our targeted ads. Two worlds slide together and a third comes into focus. Is this how people write in the future?
Lim and I exchanged emails about the value of protest, the act of reading as resistance, and the death and rebirth of the novel.
The Millions: Do you consider Dear Cyborgs a piece of protest art, or rather a means of “unveiling life” (as advocated by Tehching Hsieh)?
Eugene Lim: I half-quote a piece of self-admonition associated with Antonio Gramsci on the first page of my book: “Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.” For me, this captures a pretty common contemporary state of cognitive dissonance. So I'm not sure if the book is an act of protest as much as it's an attempt to articulate this emotional state as well as look into what it’s like to try to constantly maintain it and what it’s like to live within its turmoil.
There’s a directive made by the left that hopelessness and despair are to be avoided as they are emotions of some luxury. And furthermore, it’s bad for morale, so if one were to actually speak and so spread one’s despair, well, then the masses won’t come out, the public won’t march in the streets, and people will just give up. I think there’s a great deal of practical wisdom in this line of thought. (Here’s an even better articulation, by Pablo Iglesias of Podemos, of the near-null practical value of despair as well as that of t-shirt Marxism -- and furthermore a definition of politics as necessary and terrible.)
However, one can’t observe the ongoing situation and, on one level, not allow the stirrings of despair and hopelessness. To deny these emotions in the face of war crime, violent structural racism, climate destruction, etc. is to be intellectually dishonest. And we all live with this schizophrenia (a parallel one to our moment of apocalypse-always and simultaneous techno-futurist utopia), which is so pervasive that we barely allow ourselves to acknowledge it.
TM: Is protesting an effective way to bring about change in 2017? Or does it just allow the individual protestor to “make a moral world in which she can abide” (a line from your book)?
EL: I don’t know. I think mass movements and demonstrations have been very important. Historically it’s very important for people simply to show up. Take the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests, or the first Earth Day gathering in 1970. Nixon saw the crowd and supposedly said something like, “Some of those people are Republicans,” and went on to pass major environmental legislation. Or you could look at the large flash protests at JFK and other airports after the announcement of SCROTUS’s Muslim ban.
The counterexample cited in the book is the February 15th, 2003, worldwide day of marches to protest the US invasion of Iraq. Some call it the largest protest in human history,* but the Bush administration was undeterred. Other cynical counterexamples could include every Earth Day march of the past decade. Reductively, but not entirely inaccurately, one can argue that the state has learned that if a clear majority of public opinion runs counter to its will and the synonymous will of its corporate masters, the state can ignore this majority because it can manipulate elections and regulations so as to remain in power.
And yet and yet… protests can and do matter. The Black Lives Matter movement is a key example. Another: the ruling for same-sex marriage as recent fodder for the argument that history “bends toward justice.” Importantly, you don’t know how this is going to happen. Chomsky says that prior to Occupy Wall Street, if you were to ask him if taking over some downtown street block would make a big difference, he would have said of course not. But OWS crystallized, framed, and popularized an analysis of class inequality that is still resonating today.
Who knows which act will become significant, so arguments about effectiveness are riddled with uncertainty -- still one has to act. But how? It’s a question less answerable with a prescriptive response than with the spirit and unpredictability of art, of some flash of insight or opening.
TM: A piece of graffiti in Dear Cyborgs reads, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Is it easier for you? If so, why?
EL: That was a memorable line I’d chanced upon and which I remembered because it seemed to state the issue rather perfectly. It’s an unattributed quote found in an essay by Fredric Jameson (though others have identified its source, and a certain slovenly Slovenian I believe retweeted it). In our season, where bestseller lists and blockbusters seem to be monopolized by competing visions of dystopia and apocalypse -- but where the idea of successful collective action to combat the destruction of our planet by Big Oil remains impossible -- it would seem to me a line of some persuasive accuracy. Why is this so? Probably someone with more relevant experience than a novelist should be asked, but I’ll venture that capitalism is a very very successful cancer because it’s extremely hard to not want to keep up with the Joneses.TM: Hua Hsu writes that you have “an uncanny sense of what it’s like to be alive right now: constantly distracted, bounding between idealism and cynicism, ever conscious of the fact that we may never bring the size and complexity of our world into focus.” Do you consider this a fair characterization of what it’s like to be alive in 2017? Is this what you were going for in the book?
EL: I think Hsu’s description is a fair characterization of our times. Perpetual distraction and multitasking seem absolutely the norm, the result of the information overload and the fast-paced, shifting landscape of the attention economy. And the simultaneous intellectual cynicism/pessimism and willful idealism/optimism comes from a desire to rebel against complicity only to have ourselves discover our very existence encoded with it. But that diagnosis is not exactly news.
One thing I would like to do -- and perhaps Dear Cyborgs does a little of this -- is to approach the novel without the locus of character as its main technology. I’d like to describe the chaotic matrix in which we’re living through some other narrative device, some new way that supersedes our dependence on character as empathy avatar and our traditional use of plot as an arc about conflict resolution, and furthermore a method that accounts for the intense mind-boggling complexity we live in that somehow must be apprehended by our puny individual minds. In Dear Cyborgs, the method I tried was a kind of monologue-fractal, which is why all the characters in the book may seem empty or unrealistic, and yet their speeches seem familiar and hopefully poignant and/or meaningful.
It would be odd -- in this singularity-approaching data-flooded contemporary world, one where wild algorithmic financial transactions create hidden transnational empires and where we daily use machines the majority of us have no idea how and why they really work -- for this almost vestigial not to mention necessarily linear art form, the novel, to be the one best suited to manifest, depict, and perform our world. But maybe it’s so.
TM: How and why did you decide to end the book with these words: “…mourned and was chased and chased and fought and mourned and mourned and mourned and mourned”?
EL: I’d rather let others speculate on the meaning of the book’s ending, but I will say something about the several kinds of grieving that are undercurrents to the book and which, on a personal level, I feel are entwined. Perhaps the primary one is the historic loss, from one point of view, of even the possibility of effective protest. Or at least the loss of protest as it once was framed and done. This is a kind of loss of innocence. Then, in terms of cyborg culture, there’s also this weird grief of going through a very particular inflection point, i.e., I’m from the last generation that grew up without the internet. This makes for a rather epic middle-aged feeling of loss, which is a bit aggrandizing because my generation’s loss of youth was simultaneous with this huge cultural shift. In addition, there is another loss that only a few may feel but which nonetheless is very intense, that is: the ongoing eroding of deep reading and the loss of the novel’s supremacy in culture.
However, I believe -- and in some ways have tried to show -- that the meditative act of reading is a kind of resistance to a persistent and insidious dissolving of agency and our alienation by the forces of capitalism. Also, finally, I have tried to show that if the old narrative ideas of a Freytag plot path of redemption or self-discovery or epiphany are stale, at least there may be other possibilities. That is: the novel is dead; long live the novel.

1.The first time I ever heard of Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians was in a comment posted on Twitter. I follow a lot of avid (even rabid) readers, and one of them had, apparently, stepped out of their comfort zone to give this book a try. She had decided to follow the crowd and read this novel that was being called “Harry Potter for grown-ups.” She was not a fan. She called it a rip-off and accused Grossman of stealing from her beloved J.K. Rowling. Her response was so strong, so passionate, that my curiosity was piqued.
I looked up Grossman to see what he had done before. It turns out that he knows something about good writing. Grossman is the lead book critic for Time and has made a career out of both praising the efforts of writers who take risks and calling out those who he felt were overrated. He knew that he was entering dangerous territory when he set about writing a book that bears even a passing resemblance to anything as recognizable as the Harry Potter franchise. It was a big risk to take, but it has paid off, as evidenced by the The Magicians’ bestseller status.
The anticipation for his follow-up, The Magician King, has been building all summer, with some readers looking to it to fill the void left by the final Harry Potter film. It is well-suited to the task. Like The Magicians before it, the book is a collection of carefully chosen allusions to the books that have influenced Grossman as a writer. While these allusions were off-putting to some readers, they are a large part of the appeal for the readers who grew up reading the same books he did. I have to admit; each new reference that I stumbled across made me smile a little wider and drew me in a little further.
2.
After seeing the wide-range of responses that the book has received, I found myself hoping that responses like the ones that first caught my attention were in the minority. Grossman has assured me they were.
The Millions: What sort of comments have you had regarding the many literary allusions that are found throughout The Magicians?
Lev Grossman: There have been fewer than you would think. There was a lot of focus on it before the book came out, which was worrying. Publishers Weekly dismissed the book as “derivative.” Viking's own lawyers delayed the book's publication - they demanded rewrites to make clearer the differences between Fillory and Narnia. But following publication almost all the readers and critics I heard from have read the similarities correctly, as allusions rather than theft. People like them - they like the fact that they've read the same books I have. It's a way of recognizing our shared culture.
TM: Has anyone ever questioned you about similarities that they saw between what you wrote and another book? What did they point to, and how did you respond?
LG: I've seen it here and there, in blog comments and Amazon reviews - people harping on the Harry Potter allusions. But it's a very small minority. Early on I toured the Harry Potter conventions, talking about what I was doing and the spirit in which it was intended, to try to get the word out. I think that helped. But when people do think you've plagiarized from another writer, rather than alluded to them, the reaction is extreme. They get angry. It's a dangerous game; you have to get it right. Allusions can be very polarizing.
TM: As you wrote the novel, were you aware of your inspirations? How did you keep them from overtaking your story? How did you keep from crossing the line?
LG: I think I'm more aware of my influences than some writers - maybe it's my training as an academic, but I look for them: Rowling and Lewis, obviously, but also writers like Ursula Le Guin, Neal Stephenson, Waugh, Hemingway. In truth, it's difficult sometimes to know where the line is, to avoid getting overpowered by a strong influence. But it's also energizing. I think Harold Bloom was right in Anxiety of Influence: some writers need to feel like they've gone to war with their literary progenitors, then made their peace with them.
TM: One of the criticisms that I have seen regarding the allusions in the text is that so many of the references (Gulliver's Travels aside) are to relatively recent works. The expectation is to see mythology or Shakespeare or some other "classic." Are the modern references lost on readers? Does it make a difference?
LG: It's interesting, isn't it, how allusions to contemporary works have a different resonance than references to "classic" literature. They're certainly not lost on readers, but they can sound a bit cheap and hollow. It's a difficult line to walk - you want your characters to live in a realistic version of the contemporary cultural environment you see around you, but if you get too specific with your references, they can take on that gimmicky quality. And they date rapidly. I spent a lot of time and effort fine-tuning the allusions in The Magicians, to get the right balance.
TM: If you had to explain the difference between alluding to another work and copying that work to a classroom full of students, how would you go about it? What sort of examples would you use? Would you refer to your own writing?
LG: The key, to me, is making it clear to the reader that you're borrowing another writer's elements for a reason. You have to make sure they know not only what you're doing, but why you're doing it. It can be confusing for a writer. Initially when I would make allusions to C.S. Lewis, I would avoid overtly criticizing or satirizing Lewis's work, out of respect, and a worry that I would outrage Narnia fans. I quickly realized that the danger isn't going too far, it's not going far enough. If you're going to borrow from Lewis, you have to travesty him, openly poke fun at him, say something about him. Anything less and readers will see your allusions as merely plagiarism.
TM: What is your favorite literary reference in the novel? Do people pick up on it?
LG:The Magicians is a web of allusions - they're thicker than most people realize, and nobody gets them all (even me, probably). One of my favorite sequences in the book has Quentin and his friends turning into geese and flying south to Antarctica. This is an allusion to one of my favorite moments in one of my favorite novels, The Once and Future King, in which a young King Arthur is changed into a goose by Merlin as part of his education. I thought it stuck out by a mile when I wrote it, but surprisingly few people catch it.
TM: What references have others pointed out to you or asked about?
LG: People most often point out the more obscure references - it's a good feeling when you pick up on a reference to something that's really arcane, that you know hardly anybody else is going to spot. Cellists sometimes write to me about the Popper exercises that the characters at Brakebills have to do. They're a reference to a famous book of cello etudes that I tried, and failed, to master during my brief career as a cellist. It's something I put in there for myself, really, but when people spot it, it makes them happy.
TM: Were there any new influences that you were aware of as you wrote The Magician King? What should readers be watching for as they read?
LG:The Magician King's ancestry is a little different from that of The Magicians, so it draws from a somewhat - but not entirely - different palette of references. It's a book about journeys and quests, so there are allusions to T.H. White's and Malory's accounts of the Quest for the Holy Grail, and to The Odyssey and The Aeneid as well. It's also a little more of a mystery than The Magicians was, so there are nods - there's one in the first paragraph - to Raymond Chandler. But the most consistent presence is still C.S. Lewis, in particular Lewis's own take on the epic, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
3.
Grossman has put together A Brief Guide to the Hidden Allusions in The Magicians for Tor.com. It paints a pretty interesting picture of the world that Grossman lives in and the one he has created. The Magician King is full of the same pop-culture references and allusions to the works of Rowling, C.S. Lewis, and George R.R. Martin as The Magicians. Some are a bit more direct, such as Quentin referring to Janet as “Fillory Clinton.” They are also more time sensitive.
What The Magician King has that was a bit lacking in the first is a rich undercurrent of mythology and folklore. When searching for the root of all magic, it only makes sense that they turn to the “old gods,” an allusion to H.P. Lovecraft’sCthulhu Mythos. They are the ones who harnessed the magic that gave rise to Fillory, and, it would seem, they are none too happy that it has fallen into mortal hands. Here are a few of the less modern references from Grossman’s new book The Magician King:
p. 8: “Good luck,” Julia said. “Dryads fight. Their skin is like wood. And they have staves.”
“I’ve never seen a dryad fight,” Quentin said.
“That is because nobody is stupid enough to fight one.”
In Greek Mythology, the dryads are tree nymphs most closely associated with oak trees. They appear extensively throughout literature, typically as shy creatures who keep to themselves. It is C.S. Lewis who made them fighters, putting them alongside Aslan and the Pevensie children.
p. 22: “Et in Arcadia ego.”
A Latin phrase, meaning “I too was there in Arcadia.” It was meant as a memento mori, or a reminder of one’s own mortality. Here, Quentin is remembering that Alice’s death was not then end of the darkness that exists in Fillory.
p. 101: “They straggled to a stop in front of it, a brave company of knights assembled before the Chapel Perilous.”
The Chapel Perilous first appears in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. It is where Sir Lancelot fends off the advances of the sorceress Hellawes. This is just one of many Arthurian references throughout the novel, though it is the least direct.
p. 182: “At the end of the poem, hadn’t he run to the Goat (by which he meant the constellation Capricorn, a footnote gallantly informed her) to find New Love? Or was it lust?”
Julia is referring to John Donne and his poem “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucies Day.” By the end of the poem, Donne has decided to move on, just as Julia decides to leave magic behind for good.
p. 185: ViciousCirce and Asmodeus
The screen names of Julia and one of the other members of Free Traders Beowulf (a reference to the sci-fi role-playing game Traveller). ViciousCirce is a refrence to Circe, a minor goddess of magic in Greek mythology who plays an important role in The Odyssey. Asmodeus is the king of demons, mentioned in The Book of Tobit. Julia is very surprised to find the person behind the screen name is a 17 year old girl.
p. 321: Reynard the Fox
A European trickster figure from medieval times, Reynard is described by Grossman as “some kind of anti-gentry, anti-clerical hero of the peasantry.” There are references to Reynard in both The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
p. 338: “Benedict is in the underworld. He is not a ghost. He is a shade.”
A shade, in various mythologies, refers to the spirit of someone that is residing in the Underworld. Quentin is sent to visit Benedict there, making a trip similar to the one Aeneas makes to visit his father in The Aeneid.
The Magicians is very much a product of the world that Grossman grew up in and the type of life he led. Geeks everywhere could find something to identify with in that book, be it Harry Potter or Advanced D&D. The Magician King appeals to a wider audience, bringing the old and the new together, and creating a whole new mythology.